Time for the next part of our history… starting with the day my site got pulled apart both publicly and privately by some well meaning poker business people… recommend reading part #1 first, it is in the post below.

I left off having asked for a peer review of my site… ouch! 

The slating my site got was a little crushing at first. Luckily my years of being crushed by the corporation had sufficiently numbed me to that kind of thing and I was soon able to see that the guys tearing my ‘fantastic concept’ apart were actually dead right… the (then fairly limited) content was ok, but the navigation and design were kind of ‘out there’ as one poster said, and I was highly unlikely to convert. 

To this day I am grateful for the personal assistance received by a couple of different people after that review. If I had not listened, learned and then acted on their advice then the chances are there would have been no SNG Planet today and I would be back in another corporation (or even the same one, euch!). I have seen a lot of people ask for a similar  peer review and then not listen to the feedback given by experienced and well meaning peers… guys and girls, you have to listen – and then act!! 

Realizing that we had to scrap it and start again was hard. Erika was learning Dreamweaver as fast as possible as we went along and I was learning the business side and SEO. We were not used to working together and it was certainly tough at times. 

However, we went ahead and scrapped it, and by November 07 had a scruffy site, but one with a ‘normal’ top-menu navigation system. Traffic was just starting to increase (some people linked to us too, though we were not yet properly SEO savvy… just about aware). Going to be honest, the site was not yet anywhere near good enough. In fact it would take another whole new re-design for and the spring of ’08 to come around before we started to see some real success.

Ideas have always been my strong point, in have 5 a day every damn day! Several got turned into sites during 2008, these included our first Hungarian site, a translation into Hungarian for SNG Planet, the embryonic Omaha Planet and some other smaller sites too. 

Two major changes happened around this time. Firstly I stopped writing for other people. We were now making enough money now to survive on our income (just!) and anyway, I had savings from my corporate days for Holidays and treats. Secondly, we took an office – or at least a sub-let – realizing that working from home involved too many hours of half working / half not… I really felt we needed to get more professional in order to succeed. 

Actually the office was fun, it was in downtown Budapest and had a great view of the Gellert Hill (which contains Hungary’s ‘own liberty statue). We took a large room from a Danish designer called John and his wife, he was an amazing talent from what we saw of his work… unfortunately due to some payment issues he went bust! We were offered the lease in November 08 (ish), at the time it was too big an office for just us, so we decided to go for plan B. 

Plan B was to get a new apartment fro ourselves, then move out of Erika’s existing small apartment and use that one as an office… this is where Planet HQ is still based and where I am writing this post. We formed a limited company too ‘Planet Corporation Kft’ actually exists, it is not just me having fun with names… thought to be honest we did try for ‘Planet Media’ first, only that name was gone! In hindsight I would not advise forming a Hungarian ltd company, far too much hassle! Ah well, the primary purpose was to be able to employ people officially via the company and that is what we have done. 

At this point we found a Russian translator and started with the Russian Bonus club site and another SNG Planet translation. We also started Killer Holdem, a Texas Holdem site… I think Melted Felt might also have started at this time too, and our rakeback site, originally titled rakeback-planet was kicked off too.

In December 08 we took on our first employee, a Russian lady called Vera… the number of projects started to increase rapidly as I re-invested the cash coming in by buying translations. Soon Anna joined us, speaking native Russian and Polish – this triggered more Russian projects and a Polish version of SNG Planet / PB Klub too. Vera did not stay too long, and we replaced her with Corina, who is Romanian and also spoke French. All these languages make me feel terrible, only managing English myself… ah well, at least I can speak it well!! 

Much of 2009 was spent on a huge ‘land grab’, creating site after site and expanding SNG Planet into more languages than ever (full list is now English, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, French and German) with a minimum of 100 pages in each and now well over 1000 pages in total. We have even more language sites across the network. 

This land grab caused a few problems later, we ended up with more than we could really manage, and a lot of sites which are just not quite ‘good enough’ – as in too scruffy / not well optimized. One big problem was the quality of some of the translations… for example I paid a local who had checked out fine a lot of money to do 100 German articles for us – later these turned out to be less than useless (even embarrasing to publish). Fortunately this is now resolved…big and expensive lesson learned there! In hindsight, slowing down could have meant fewer but higher quality sites.

We also did another new version of SNG Planet’s design at the end of 2009 which actually turned out to be a backward step in terms of conversions. We are still addressing these issues, having aged sites with great content to revive is a nice problem to have, though it has meant I have to put some newer projects on hold. 

Erika and I were getting to the point where we found it impossible to work together by the end of 2009… making often tense situations in the office. I actually fired her in Feb of 2010… a great day for both of us!! 

I’ll come to that in the last part of our history… to be published very soon! 

GL at the tables, Mark